eBay is reporting that it has suspended a member's privileges after bidders on his merchandise reported that they had either not received an item that they had paid for or that they received something other than what they had ordered. In addition, eBay also gave the police and the U.S. Postal Service's fraud department the member's information.

According to eBay, the bidder in question had received positive reviews from bidders in the past but lately has been bidding on his own items to drive up the price–an action that is grounds for immediate suspension from eBay.

JOEL'S OPINION
It looks like eBay is getting tough on fraud. If you think that you know how to beat the system, consider yourself warned.

eBay has reported that it receives one fraud complaint for every 25,000 transactions. If you take into account that eBay is currently selling over 4 million items a day, that's a lot of cases of fraud. This makes me wonder how many other people have sold stuff on eBay and not delivered. With that many items and sellers to keep track of, I'm sure there are many that have fallen through the cracks.

On another note, eBay is reporting that it serves over 1.5 billion page views per month. I bet eBay could make its money with an ad banner on just the front page alone. Perhaps that's in the cards for eBay in the future. That's definitely a lot of page views to sell.

One more thing: I just realized that eBay stores a credit card for each registered seller. I wonder how many crackers have tried to gain access to that database? Imagine if someone succeeded. Ouch.